Mylo Review – Automate Your Savings and Achieve Your Financial Goals

Ever wondered if there was an easy way to save and grow your money to achieve your financial goals automatically? Meet the company Mylo! With their new app just launched officially on July 6th on the iOS App Store (you can download it here) for Canadians, Mylo is an automated investing app that rounds up your daily purchases and invest the spare change. Technically, what it does is that it rounds up your transactions to the nearest $1 and invests the difference into personally tailored diversified portfolio of ETFs (index funds). Everything is automated and I already LOVE it. So far the last few months, Mylo has invested $178 from rounding up my usual transactions, which I think is awesome as I didn’t even notice it!

If this is something that sounds familiar to you, this is because it’s kind of the Canadian equivalent of Acorns app (which is only available for people in the US and Australia). I’ll explain the differences later on, but in a few words, while the fees are quite the same Mylo is more focused on achieving your financial goals.

What’s the purpose of Mylo exactly

The team at Mylo found out that:

“1 in 2 Canadians between the ages of 18-34 has less than $1,000 in savings, regardless of their income.”

In fact, according to recent studies, “millennials in Canada were more concerned about saving than any other age group”. It’s also been said that millennials are willing for more “Goals-based investing“. This is because once a goal has been set, it is way more easy to focus which in turns encourage sticking with the initial plan.

In response to this, what Mylo did is that they built a tool aimed at taking the stress out of achieving financial goals. Mylo automatically invests your spare change (once a week) in index funds (ETFs), with a portfolio manager managing your account to remove the hassle to get started when you do not have any investment knowledge.

Wanna get started in three minutes?

How does Mylo work

When you sign-up (that’s literally a three-minute process and there’s no minimum deposit required), you just have to link your existing cards and choose from five different portfolio (conservative, conservative moderate, moderate, moderate aggressive and aggressive) which can be unique for each specific goal you would like to set (such as building up an emergency fund or saving for retirement).

Every time you’ll be using the cards you just linked, Mylo will round up the transaction to the nearest dollar and invest the difference in your Mylo account. You can also make one-time contributions, as well as setting up recurring contributions.

Quick tip: you can adjust the settings to round up to another number and not just a dollar.

Behind the scenes, roundups are not done in real time but instead are aggregated once a week and then transferred in your Mylo account from a designated funding account (like your checking account). This is done to prevent bank transaction limits or fees occurred because of too many transactions per week. You can connect as many cards as you want, though all roundups are taken from the same linked checking account. You’re in total control of your roundups, you can pause roundups at any time and withdraw or deposit money as frequently as you like.

Quick tip: if you’re afraid you might go overdraft because of this sometimes, don’t worry, Mylo sends you a notification and you have to manually approve the transfer if your balance goes below $25 to prevent from overdraft fees.

Down the road, Mylo will also provide you with financial insights (such as tips, recommendations and education materials) to help you save money and achieve your financial goals at the same time.

Another great feature from Mylo is that you can define some specific goals (such as saving for retirement or for a house down-payment) and the goal amount and end date are completely up to you. Simply set up a goal, upload a picture of that goal, and specify when you would like to achieve that goal by. Remember that you can also boost your goals with one-time deposits to accomplish them faster! Once defined, you have to set the percentage of your roundups that you want to attribute towards your goal. I’ve personally chosen a single goal which is a “Vacation Fund” for my upcoming vacation this summer with my family, with a $1k amount which I should need for this!

Quick tip: use the boost feature as an impulse buy prevention feature. For example, if you were about to spend $15 on your usual morning breakfast but decided to make it at home instead, you could bank that $15 into your Mylo account as a reward to yourself!

Try Mylo!

The dashboard (from the web interface) is visually appealing and investor friendly. You just have a few options to set up after you’ve signed up and after this you can completely let it run on auto-pilot! The dashboard only shows you what’s necessary to get started:

An overview of your account.

Your investor profile.

Quick access to your account statements.

A tab to manage your funding.

How does it compare with Acorns

As Mylo looks a lot like Acorns (at least it seems!), the team at Mylo has written a nice summary of the differences between the two services. Here are the three main differences:

Mylo is available in Canada only (at the moment!)

-> Acorns is only available for US & Australia

Mylo is $1 per month (free if you registered before May, 1st 2017)

-> Acorns is $1 per month for accounts under $5,000 and accounts over $5,000 pay 0.25% per year

Mylo main focus is to help you achieve your financial goals

-> Acorns was not designed with *goals* in mind

Pros of using Mylo

No minimum: no minimum to open an account with Mylo. You can simply let it run automatically with the roundups and you can also choose to make one time or recurring contributions.

Automated approach: this is the reason I love it so much. If you don’t have to think about saving, you’re more likely to do it. Just set it up the first time and watch your money grow.

Goal oriented: this really sets them apart from other applications that have roundup investments. The goals you define are completely personalized (the goal amount as well as the end date!).

Financial insights: as you make your day-to-day transactions, Mylo also provides valuable insights on where you spend your money and offers solutions to find you greater saving.

Secured platform: it’s backed by Canadian ShareOwner, which was recently bought by Wealthsimple, and they also feature advanced bank-level security.

Of course, there are a few shortcomings and disadvantages to using Mylo, but fortunately for us there aren’t a lot.

Where Mylo falls short

You need to be in Canada because it only works there (yet?).

One of Mylo shortcomings is that you are limited in the kind of account you can open up. You only have the option to open non-registered accounts. That’s why investors should prioritize maxing out their tax-free or tax-deferred accounts before contributing significant money into Mylo.

If you don’t do a lot of transactions with your cards, you’re not going to invest that much with Mylo. So unless you add some one-time deposits or recurring contributions, what you will invest with Mylo might seem low for some people.

You can only use Mylo with the official iPhone App (an Android app as well as the web interface should also be available shortly).

Finally, you can lose your money. Even if your account is insured with the Canadian Investor Protection Fund (CIPF)for up to $1,000,000, there’s no promise your investments will go up as there are always market risks associated with investing. However, this is not specific to Mylo but with anything in the investment world.

Mylo should definitely be used alongside other tools such as Wealthsimple (check out my complete review here) and not specifically as your primary way to invest your money. Even if you’re not investing that much with Mylo, it’s still better than nothing invested at all! And of course remember that you should be prioritizing having an emergency fund before investing.

Watch your account grow over time with roundups (or you can also make one-time deposits or recurring ones).

If you’re having trouble setting aside money to invest, or if you want to get started investing easily (to reap the benefits of compound interest) while achieving your financial goals at the same time, Mylo is definitely a great app to consider. The automatics roundups make saving and investing easy, and most investors would be surprised at how quickly spare change piles up!

What do you think of Mylo? Wanna try it out?

So here it is, my complete detailed Mylo review! I hope you’re gonna enjoy using Mylo as much as I do. I’m quite obsessed when it comes to trying out new and interesting financial apps and this is one you should definitely check out because it looks so promising. The best part? There’s no need to change anything about your habits as everything is handled automatically! If you want to check it out you can get started in as little as 3 minutes:

Spend like you usually do and watch your spare change piles up quickly.

The goal-oriented platform, the insights provided as well as the complete automation of savings is what hooked me up in the first place. This is really an easy and interesting way to upgrade your saving habits and to get started investing if you have not already. Looking forward to the next few months to see how my account with Mylo is doing!

– Vincent

Have you checked out Mylo already? Do you think this is something interesting? Let me know in the comments!

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I loved your post! I was so excited when Mylo launched on the App Store, and I’m super excited to have a hands-off investing platform like Mylo in Canada.

I’m definitely going to be following your posts on Mylo, Wealthsimple, etc.

I’m a fan!

I’ll be blogging about my journey with various investment apps and services on the market as well.

Question! Have you tried Lending Loop by any chance? It’s a P2P lending platform in Canada. It’s a bit higher risk as far as investing goes, but it’s an interesting opportunity! I’d love to hear your thoughts on it!

Hi Josh and thanks for dropping by! Yes finally Mylo is available that’s great indeed, been following it for a long time it was about time.
I know Lending Loop and this is something interesting I’d like to try in the near future, but even if it’s available in Canada, it’s not available in Quebec yet 🙂